Raise the Hammer

Believe me, when the first picture of a line of politicians holding silver colored shovels digging into an impossibly neat pile of dirt, your small minded, angry little councilors will change their attitudes.

1. They will realize this is the best thing in the world getting your picture taken showing your voters you were part of the reason something big and important to a lot of people, is actually happening.

2. They still won't like LRT and personally won't support it but, if they want to still keep their job, their public persona will change.

The trick is to keep them away from the process around LRT or disinterested long enough that the planning/design work gets done and RFQ's and RFP's go out. When many local companies start lining up for the main contracts and possible sub contracts as well as local workers start getting hired for pre construction work, which is usually very high value work it will be too late to stop.

One of the best tricks LRT supporters both political and just regular people did here in Ottawa, to kill off the last of the big anti LRT opposition was to take happy smiling pictures with engineers doing soil testing, core drilling, surveying and then announcing on blogs or through the mainstream media," look at the big brain power and local heroes that get employed for a project like this, even before the first big shovel hits the ground"!

It becomes very difficult to kill LRT when you have to fight pictures of very highly trained "local heroes" (that label is a very important part) doing their critically important jobs. Even if most people don't fully understand what they are doing. Telling people that these local guys and girls would be working somewhere else on other projects or for other companies in other cities if there was no LRT project here. The optics of seeing local faces, doing work locally, for your friends and neighbors, people just can't turn around and say, "fire them and throw away years of work and effort".

It becomes very hard for anti LRT groups to not look like jerks and say, "sorry we don't want any work done here that will forever take away car lanes and change things here for the better! We think there is another solution, we can't tell you what it is or how we will do it but when it happens will make sure we hire you, we just have to make sure you don't raise my taxes too much"!